Book Image

C++ High Performance - Second Edition

By : Björn Andrist, Viktor Sehr
5 (2)
Book Image

C++ High Performance - Second Edition

5 (2)
By: Björn Andrist, Viktor Sehr

Overview of this book

C++ High Performance, Second Edition guides you through optimizing the performance of your C++ apps. This allows them to run faster and consume fewer resources on the device they're running on without compromising the readability of your codebase. The book begins by introducing the C++ language and some of its modern concepts in brief. Once you are familiar with the fundamentals, you will be ready to measure, identify, and eradicate bottlenecks in your C++ codebase. By following this process, you will gradually improve your style of writing code. The book then explores data structure optimization, memory management, and how it can be used efficiently concerning CPU caches. After laying the foundation, the book trains you to leverage algorithms, ranges, and containers from the standard library to achieve faster execution, write readable code, and use customized iterators. It provides hands-on examples of C++ metaprogramming, coroutines, reflection to reduce boilerplate code, proxy objects to perform optimizations under the hood, concurrent programming, and lock-free data structures. The book concludes with an overview of parallel algorithms. By the end of this book, you will have the ability to use every tool as needed to boost the efficiency of your C++ projects.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
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16
Index

Objects in memory

All the objects we use in a C++ program reside in memory. Here, we will explore how objects are created and deleted from memory, and also describe how objects are laid out in memory.

Creating and deleting objects

In this section, we will dig into the details of using new and delete. Consider the following way of using new to create an object on the free store and then deleting it using delete:

auto* user = new User{"John"};  // allocate and construct 
user->print_name();             // use object 
delete user;                    // destruct and deallocate 

I don't recommend that you call new and delete explicitly in this manner, but let's ignore that for now. Let's get to the point; as the comments suggest, new actually does two things, namely:

  • Allocates memory to hold a new object of the User type
  • Constructs a new User object in the allocated memory space by calling the constructor...